A police officer was hit by a taxi outside my window this morning.
The hood of the taxi was crumpled up, the windshield cracked. The officer's legs were twisted at unnatural angles. His shoulders were hunched upward and inward. His arms would twitch sporadically, fingers making claws. It was raining heavily, so I wouldn't realize until they loaded him into the ambulance just how much blood covered his face and the pavement.
I know this because I watched the whole thing, and photographed it.
I heard a squeal of brakes; a sickening, meaty crunch; shouts and screams. A quick glance out the window: a taxi, skewed across two lanes; an olive-clad form lying on its side, blood trickling from its mouth and booted feet tangential (at the wrong angle) to uniform slacks. I ran to get my camera.
The apartment's patio had an unobstructed view of the scene, of the onlookers lining the street, of the wrecked taxi and its panicking driver. I got out there, camera in hand—and I choked.
I took a couple of shots and went back inside. I'm not sure if the daggers I felt being glared at me were the actual stares of the onlookers or my own self-consciousness. Did they see the bald gringo standing in his undershirt on a balcony, or was that picture only in my mind's eye?
I had no credentials, nothing that said “journalist.” A gringo with a camera is, nine times out of ten, a tourist. A gringo with a camera at the scene of an accident is probably a voyeur.
I fled back inside. Nick was standing by the window, looking down. I mentioned my dilemma to him.
“I can't decide between being a journalist and looking like a decent human being.”
He looked up at me. “Be a journalist.”
I ran upstairs to my room and opened the window so that I could peek out and still get some decent, discrete shots. I told myself that I was being respectful, and that I was doing it for their sake—for the paramedics, for the cop's friends, for the driver and for the onlookers. The objective part of my brain, though, knows that I was doing it so that I wouldn't be thought an asshole gringo.
It's a fear I'm going to have to get over. With a press pass or credentials, I hope it'll be easier. The biggest challenge I have to overcome, every time, is my dread of imposing on others. (Specifically, having others see me as imposing on them.) It happened in Cusco with my research; it happened at the Herald Democrat with interviews for the paper; and it's happening now. In all those instances, I had to swallow my anxiety and get over it. If I plan to make my living as a journalist, it's something I can't tolerate.
As for the officer, I believe that he died. There was a lot of blood on his face, his clothing, the windshield of the taxi. The ambulance took a long time to pull out—not the kind of sirens-blaring exit one would imagine for a badly injured police officer.
Right now, I'm not sure what I feel. I'm not sure I feel anything. The dominant emotion at the time was my own anxiety at being seen as some sick, bloodthirsty tourist. I don't think I've fully absorbed that I may have watched a man die this morning just before lunch.
What put the distance between he and I? I don't think it was the four floors separating us. I worry that it was the camera and all it represents. A 15x optical zoom brings you so much closer to your subject visually but allows you to insulate your emotions from what you observe. I was thinking about angles, getting my subject in the frame, trying for action shots of bicycle paramedics scrabbling in their packs for neck braces or shooing onlookers back another few meters. I wasn't thinking about his wife, the dread the taxi driver must have felt or that of the driver's sobbing family (who rushed over as fast as they could).
It feels like an odd paradox: I'm a journalist to tell people's stories, but today the story isolated me from the people. It's a balance that will only come with time, I think.
In the meantime, however, send lawyers, guns and money.
J.
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